Immanence

What we say being an image, a semblance, is what without being really non-existent, doesn’t exist nevertheless.Clément Rosset

For PH Museum, we looked at “photography” from the perspective of a philosophy of the image Today.

An image as a surface, a superficies, a jumble of data; a screen, a mirror or an illusion.

The contemporary omnipresence of images has transformed the way we communicate. Photographs are ubiquitous, constantly circulating and transferring some kind of information. Which ones exactly, I am not sure we know. Indeed, photography has been the modernist tool of excellence for an age that believed in science, objectivity and rationality. In post-modernity or the post-truth era, can photography still be a medium able to reflect upon our time? To translate what so often is withdrawn from our sight, hidden, concealed from public knowledge? To communicate the sensorial, the intangibility of feelings, the ambivalence of perception?

This exhibition proposes a look at artists using photography to reflect upon the ambiguity of vision. In their research, they twist the representative nature of the image to explore what is not visible. They look at themes such as the complication of communicating, the fleeting affects, the fragmentation of experiences, political secrets, prostitution, the relationship to our inner body, visual love, and social conventions.

The idea of surface is central to this selection: surface of the photograph, of the visible, of the viewable; surface that separates the outside from the inside, the public sphere from the private one; surface that conceals and creates meaning through interferences. Surface as a point of contact where things might happen.

Surface like a skin, the deepest thing in men, as Paul Valery would say.